By Leonardo Wexell Severo
In an interview with Carta Maior, Daniel Pascual Hernández, coordinator general of the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC) of Guatemala, explains the motives that drive about one of every nine Guatemalans to migrate to the United States and points out the effects of the Free Trade Agreements, of embassies being turned into business offices for multinational corporations in the Caribbean. “The spoils of war are in the presidency, the business center for concessions, for the privatization of the national heritage,” he declares.
Carta Maior: How does the Comité de Unidad Campesina analyze the present clashes in the Guatemalan countryside?
Daniel Pascual Hernández: We have a high level of concentration of land ownership, which makes the struggle over land in Guatemala quite similar to those in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. From the agrarian point of view, capitalism was instituted in 1871, with coffee, cotton and later with bananas, raw materials for export. That monoculture brought with it a peculiarity: the concentration of land together with the oppression of the indigenous. The law on land began by handing the territory over to the invaders, the colonialists, leaving aside belts so the indigenous would not revolt. There was a period of advances from 1944 to 1954, the decade of democracy, under the governments of Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, but then came the United States invasion. (more…)